AS members of the Bere Alston Action Group who are campaigning against planning proposals that are threatening to destroy our village life, I and the undernoted were at the meeting of the parish council whose antics you reported in the October 7 issue.
We had hoped we could have had a reasoned explanation of the council?s actions in their support of the proposals to impose significant extra building in the village, over and above the natural organic growth of some 70 or so dwellings, mostly on redeveloped sites, which have been produced in the last two years.
This arbitrarily imposed target has caused a great deal of local resentment which the council has so far ignored. It became quite clear that no such explanation was going to be made.
This is not the only topic on which local concern has manifested itself, and for which the council has to take the blame. We were truly astonished at the huge turnout of residents that took place and their determination for once to be heard.
The notice sent round advising us of the meeting was not issued by us, but the effect of it was to bring to the surface the festering discontent which so many ordinary people feel at the way decisions are taken and imposed.
Judy Medhurst is quoted as saying that it was not democratic. On the contrary, so much of the way we are governed, though masquerading as being democratic, is really manipulated dictatorship, as your front page story of financial bullying by government shows. This applies widely across the political system as a whole, studiously cultivated by the present government.
It is time for another Magna Carta, or perhaps a Peasants? Revolt, to remind those who presume too much on the inertia of the voters that sooner or later the worm will turn. In Bere Alston the worm has turned, and we will be heard.
Geoffrey M Stowell, Mike Benson, Roger Rowe, John Voaden, Ron Gray, Helen Donnellan, Mike Blackmore.